A big voter fraud arrest and a separate voter fraud conviction in the past eight days again show that illicit voting is real and not terribly rare. The good news is that those on the side of ensuring voter integrity keep winning in the courts.
In 2020, I explained that New York’s absentee voting “portal” was so slipshod as to be an open invitation to fraud. “Someone could easily go to the portal using someone else’s name and date of birth and registered address within the district,” I wrote, “then ask for an absentee ballot to be sent somewhere else, and then fill in the ballot and mail it in.”
It is of precisely that offense that Jason T. Schofield, the Republican Rensselaer County Board of Elections commissioner, stands accused after his Sept. 13 arrest: “The indictment accuses Schofield of using an online state Board of Elections portal to request absentee ballots on behalf of eight voters who had no interest in voting, did not request absentee ballots and didn’t know that Schofield was using their personal information to obtain the ballots.”
In Stamford, Connecticut, there was not just an arrest but a conviction. John Mallozzi, the city’s former Democratic Party chief, was found guilty of 28 felonies for forging absentee ballots in the 2015 municipal elections.
Both instances involve abuse of absentee ballots. As voter integrity experts long have noted and as even the liberal New York Times stated as a fact before it became politically inconvenient, absentee and mail-in ballots are much riper for abuse and fraud than in-person voting. The Heritage Foundation’s database of election fraud cases shows that a large proportion of voting-related convictions result from the misuse of absentee or mail-in ballots. (And, of course, the sheer size of the database shows how absurd it is for the establishment media repeatedly to claim that voter fraud is nearly nonexistent. By now, the media’s willful ignorance has become the moral equivalent of a flat-out lie.)
That’s why it is so important that the Public Interest Legal Foundation, a voter integrity group, last week won a lawsuit in Delaware. The suit aims to make Delaware abide by its state constitutional provision allowing for voting by mail not merely for the sake of convenience but only if a citizen has a specified reason for being unable to vote in person. Delaware’s legislature had passed a law allowing vote by mail essentially on demand with no reason necessary. A Delaware court last week decided, correctly, that the new “anything goes” law violates the state constitution, so the court invalidated it. The court understood that the Constitution’s limitations on absentee voting were intended to ensure the integrity of elections and that the “loss of voting power [of non-absentee voters] constitutes irreparable injury” to them if mail-in rules are a free-for-all.
This was the second big ballot integrity decision PILF won in the past month. In August, it won an initial victory in a suit to force Michigan to clear dead people from its voting rolls. PILF’s research found that 25,975 names of dead people remained listed as “eligible voters,” meaning if someone shows up to vote in those names, they might get away with it. And yes, in a study of 42 states in recent elections, PILF found that 7,890 votes were actually cast in the names of dead people in 2016 and 6,718 in 2018.
Nonetheless, Michigan Secretary of State Jocelyn Benson, a Democrat, has fought against removing those names from the lists, even though PILF provided newspaper obituaries and even some photos of gravestones as proof.
To avoid fraud of the sorts we are now seeing in New York, Connecticut, and elsewhere, watchdogs like PILF keep the pressure on in legal action across the country. Their court cases amount to a huge vote for fair elections.
